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Professor Archie Brown reviews ‘How Did the Cold War Really End?’ in New York Review of Books

Friday 10th March 2017

Archie Brown has written a review for the New York Review of Books of The End of the Cold War, 1985–1991by Robert Service, a book that focuses on arguably the architects of this ending: Mikhail Gorbachev, Ronald Reagan, US Secretary of State George Shultz and the USSR's last Foreign Affairs Minister, Eduard Shevardnadze.

“In retrospect everything about the cold war’s ending can appear deceptively simple,” Archie writes. “The Soviet economy could not keep up with that of the United States or, indeed, with the fast-developing market economies in Asia.” However, in this review he goes on to challenge this widely accepted view, and instead suggests that “[i]t was not economic crisis that compelled radical reform but radical reform that led in due course to a political crisis.”